Archives for April 18, 2008

Two shows in this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column, one on Broadway (Harvey Fierstein’s A Catered Affair) and one off (Liz Flahive’s From Up Here). Here’s an excerpt.
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If good intentions could keep a musical open, “A Catered Affair” would run forever. I don’t know when I’ve seen a show that looked better on paper, and I liked the idea of turning Richard Brooks’ 1956 film into a stage musical so much that I was actively rooting for the results to give pleasure. Instead they’re a disappointment–one so intelligently staged and performed, however, that at times you can almost believe the show is as good as its production. Almost, but not quite: Harvey Fierstein and John Bucchino, the creators of this new stage version, have missed the spirit of the movie by a mile, and no amount of creativity on the part of their collaborators is enough to make up for their own miscalculations.
The film, adapted by Gore Vidal from one of Paddy Chayefsky’s “Philco Television Playhouse” kitchen-sink TV dramas, was a sequel of sorts to “Marty,” the Chayefsky teleplay about a lonely butcher whose 1955 screen version knocked down four Oscars. Ernest Borgnine (whose performance in the film of “Marty” had just made him a star) and Bette Davis played Tom and Aggie Hurley, a Bronx cab driver and his sourpuss wife whose daughter is about to get married to her longtime beau. Mom foolishly decides to blow the family’s savings on a fancy wedding, even though the daughter (played by Debbie Reynolds) would rather tie the knot at City Hall….
Mr. Fierstein was right to think that Mr. Vidal’s screenplay had the stuff of a musical in it, but he made three big mistakes in adapting it for the stage. The first was to put an anachronistically contemporary spin on his book by turning Aggie’s brother, played in the film by Barry Fitzgerald, into a more or less openly gay florist, and the second was to play the part himself. No doubt there were at least a couple of gay Irish Catholic florists living in the Bronx in the mid-1950s, but the notion that one of them would have had the nerve to camp it up in front of his kinfolk (“If you will kindly remove your peas and posteriors, I will take to the cloistered confines of my secret shame”) strains credulity past the breaking point.
Mistake No. 3 was to invite Mr. Bucchino to write the score. I say this with regret, for I esteem him as one of the best cabaret songwriters around. The problem is that his songs, with their pastel harmonies and introspective lyrics, have nothing in common with the working-class setting…
Speaking of kitchen-sink dramas, Liz Flahive has gone all out in “From Up Here,” setting her first Off-Broadway play in and around a Midwestern home whose costly-looking kitchen (designed by Allen Moyer) is equipped with every modern appliance known to man or woman. I can’t remember the last time I saw a show with a set that contained a dishwasher and a clothes washer. Don’t be deceived by the décor, though: Ms. Flahive is a playwright of promise who has contrived to find fresh things to say in the overworked dramatic language of domestic realism….
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Read the whole thing here.

“You don’t get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you get to be a real professor of pain.”
Paddy Chayefsky, Marty